Culture Machine, InterZone

The Somnambulist and the Hermaphrodite: Deleuze and Johann de
Montereggio and Occultism

Christian Kerslake

One of Gilles Deleuze's first articles, published in 1946, was
an introduction to a new French edition of an arcane work of
philosophy bearing the title Mathesis: or Studies on the
Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge, by one Dr Johann Malfatti
de Montereggio.1 Deleuze was twenty-one when he
published his introduction to the French edition of Malfatti's
Mathesis, which was the first new edition for a hundred
years. 'Mathesis, Science and Philosophy' is one of a group of five
texts he published in the period 1945-7, and which he subsequently
repudiated and omitted from French bibliographies of his work.
2 In the previous French edition
of Malfatti's work (published in 1849), the entire book had been
given the abbreviated title of what is in fact the first of its
five essays, La Mathèse. The edition to which
Deleuze adds his introduction in 1946 is a revised translation of
this volume.3 The original book
had first been published in Leipzig in 1845 as Studien
über Anarchie und Hierarchie des Wissens, mit
besonderer Beziehung auf die Medicin [Studies on the Anarchy
and Hierarchy of Knowledge, with special reference to Medicine].
The titles and topics of the five separate but interconnected
studies are enough to show that we are dealing with a rather
curious volume:

1. 'Mathesis as Hieroglyph or Symbolism of the Triple Life of
the Universe, or the Mystical Organon of the Ancient Indians' is a
detailed account of the principles of esoteric numerology.

2.'Only in the Process, Not in the Product' is a development of
Schellingian Naturphilosophie, with frequent reference to
alchemy.

3. On the Architectonic of the Human Organism, Or the Triple
Life in the Egg and the Triple Egg in Life' is an application of a
nature-philosophical notion of embryogenesis to the whole of human
life.

4. 'On Rhythm and Type, Consensus and Antagonism in General, and
Particularly in Man' is an analysis of periodicity in
physiology.

5. 'On the Double Sex in General and on Human Sex in
Particular', is an analysis of human sexuality from the perspective
of the esoteric notion of the hermaphrodite.

Who was this Malfatti and by what narrow route did the young
Deleuze come upon his work? The name is not familiar from histories
of Western philosophy, nor does it appear in histories of German
thought in the nineteenth century. But it turns out that this
enigmatic figure left important traces in a number of distinct
areas in modern thought and culture. He was born in 1775 in Italy,
but in the early 1800s based himself in Vienna, becoming a
physician in the German Romantic tradition, a follower of
Schellingian Naturphilosophie. He became sought-after as a
physician, and became personal physician to members of Napoleon
Bonaparte's family, and to Beethoven, as well as to other figures
from royalty and the nobility. Studies on the Anarchy and
Hierarchy of Knowledge was his second book, published
thirty-six years after his first, an Entwurf einer Pathogenie
aus der Evolution und Revolution des Lebens [Sketch of a
Pathogenesis out of the Evolution and Revolution of Life] (1809).
Another work on medicine followed, Neue Heilversuche
(1847), and what appears to be his final work, published in 1853,
was an account of Kartoffel-krankheit, with particular
reference to the hermaphroditic nature of the potato (Malfatti
1853). He died in 1859. Although it is true that his two main books
are rarely referred to in histories of Naturphilosophie,
it turns out that Anarchy and Hierarchy exerted a
significant influence in a more subterranean milieu of modern
culture. When René Guénon, the leading
French esotericist of his time, reviewed the 1946 edition of
Malfatti, (whose book was 'one of those which is often spoken
about, but which few have read'), he acknowledged the historical
value of the re-publication, due to 'the considerable role that
this work and others of the same genre played in the constitution
of occultism at the end of the 19th century'
(Guénon 1947: 88). Malfatti's influence is found most
explicitly in the work of one of the leaders of the esoteric
movement of Martinism, Gérard Encausse, otherwise
known as 'Papus' (see Reggio 2003). Papus appended a detailed
analysis of Malfatti's Mathesis to his 1894 medical
dissertation L'Anatomie philosophique et ses divisions,
and in his ensuing occult works he continued to refer to Malfatti
at crucial points.4

Martinism
was one of the main currents of occultism in the nineteenth
century, originating in the thought of Martinès de
Pasqually (?-1774), and his follower Louis Claude Saint-Martin
(1743-1803). The former, a Spanish or Portuguese Jew, had
inaugurated a number of secret societies in France devoted to
theurgic ritual, while his follower Saint-Martin was the author of
mystical tracts (including one entitled L'Homme du
désir) which gave primacy to the mystical task of
interior transformation over ritual (Harvey 2005). By the end of
the 19th century, a number of Rosicrucians, Freemasons,
Illuminati and theosophists inhabited Paris and assembled to form a
new movement of French Martinism, in which Papus and Stanislas de
Guaita were the intellectually dominant figures.5 The theoretical foundations of late French
Martinism were provided by Malfatti and Hoëne Wronski
(also cited by Deleuze, in his main philosophical treatise,
Difference and Repetition). The philosophical ideas of
Malfatti and Wronski mediated the Martinists' access to the
traditional texts of Hermetic and occult philosophy.

The new edition of Anarchy and Hierarchy for which
Deleuze wrote the introduction was issued in a limited edition by a
small publishing house, 'Griffon d'Or', which published books
mostly on occult themes in the immediate aftermath of the war,
including a number of books on Martinism. The unnamed editors
revised the 1849 translation, reproducing the exceedingly strange
illustrations of Indian divinities and hermaphrodites that Malfatti
had included in the German version.6 Given that Malfatti's name does not appear ever
again in Deleuze's writings, we could be forgiven for thinking that
Deleuze's introduction to Malfatti's Mathesis is merely a
youthful dalliance with occultism. But occult themes continue to
run throughout Deleuze's work: not only does the term 'mathesis'
appear at crucial points of Difference and Repetition,
along with a weird emphasis on the esoteric use of the mathematical
calculus, but his interest in somnambulism, the notion of the world
as an egg, the theory of the second birth and the recurring image
of the hermaphrodite all refer back to ideas found in Malfatti's
book. Many ideas that can be traced back to Malfatti's
Mathesis resurface in disguise in one of Deleuze's
valedictory texts, 'To Have Done with Judgment', published in 1993
in Critique et Clinique.7

Could the esoteric theory of mathesis found in Malfatti's
Anarchy and Hierarchy be the key that unlocks the mystery
of Deleuze's avowedly 'esoteric' use of the calculus in
Difference and Repetition? There Deleuze explicitly says
that there is a mathesis universalis that corresponds to
his theory of Ideas (Deleuze 1968: 181; 190). Strangely, Deleuze's
admission that his interest lies in 'the esoteric history of
differential philosophy' (ibid, 170) has been overlooked. It has
been assumed that by 'esoteric' Deleuze simply means 'obscure'; and
of course it is true that the figures of Solomon
Maïmon, Hoëne Wronski and Jean
Bordas-Desmoulin are rarely referred to in standard histories of
the mathematical calculus. But it is also true that both Malfatti's
mathesis and Wronski's use of the calculus played important roles
in the birth of modern occultism. Sarane Alexandrian writes that
'Wronski holds, in occult philosophy, the place that Kant holds in
classical philosophy' (Alexandrian 1983: 133).8 Both Malfatti and Wronski had arrived in the
nebulous terrain of occultism after apprenticeships in post-Kantian
philosophy. Wronski was the author of the first exhaustive
presentation of Kant's philosophy in French (Philosophie
critique découverte par Kant, 1803). He
subsequently developed a post-Kantian theory of calculus and
attempted to develop a cabala-influenced philosophy of the absolute
(which he called 'Messianism') that would surpass that of Schelling
and Hegel. Malfatti was a Schellingean nature-philosopher who
developed and synthesised Schelling's ideas in the areas of
medicine, somnambulism and mythology. Deleuze's interest in these
thinkers reveals legacies of post-Kantian philosophy which are
quite other to the landscapes of Marxism, neo-Kantianism,
existentialism, etc, that are familiar to contemporary continental
philosophy. It is a possibility worth considering that one of
Deleuze's clandestine aims, from the beginning, was to contribute
to a specifically post-Kantian resurrection of the esoteric notion
of mathesis.

In his fascinating survey of occultist philosophy, the
surrealist Sarane Alexandrian connects both Malfatti's account of
'mathesis' and the philosophy of Wronski with an older occult
tradition of 'arithmosophy'. The notion of mathesis, he tells us,
is used by theologians and occultists to denote the conjugation of
metaphysics and mathematics in a scientia Dei, or science
of God. For instance, in 1660 the bishop of Vigenavo, Juan
Caramuel, wrote a Mathesis audax, in which he declared
that 'there are numerous questions in the philosophy of the divine
which can not be understood without mathesis' (cited in Alexandrian
1983: 112). Frances A. Yates, the scholar of the Hermetic
tradition, has brought to light a tradition of 'mathesis' that
first fully emerges in European thought in the work of Ramon Lull,
but which has influences further back in Arabic alchemy and the
Hermetic writings of 3rd century Alexandria. Yates's aim
was to show that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake not because
of his affirmation of Copernicanism, but because of his attempts to
initiate a 'new religion of Love, Art, Magic and Mathesis' (Yates
1966: 371; Yates 1964: 354). In his introduction, Deleuze places
Malfatti in a more mainstream philosophical tradition, reminding us
that, despite his mind-body dualism, Descartes too (according to
Baillet's biography) dreamed of a mathesis universalis.
But he could have cited other earlier and later philosophical
sources with more overt connections with hermetic esotericism, such
as Leibniz or Novalis (both important to his work). Leibniz
searched for an arithmetica universalis or scientia
generalis, which would allow one to deal with all possible
permutations and combinations in all disciplines. Novalis in turn
took up the project of an arithmetica universalis (III,
23-25; Dyck 1959: 22). This universal mathesis was to include 'all
mental operations, volitional and aesthetic experiences, and all
knowledge' (Dyck 1959: 93). After Wronski and Malfatti,
philosophical interest in mathesis declines, and the works of Papus
and Guaita are notably lacking in philosophical references (apart
from to Wronski and Malfatti themselves). But the promises made for
mathesis were very great. Deleuze cites Malfatti's claim that
'mathesis shall be for man in his relations with the infinite, what
locomotion is for space' (Deleuze 1946: xv). So the question is:
what happened to mathesis? Was it ever declared to be impossible?
Did anyone ever think there was any need to declare it
impossible? That Malfatti and Wronski both explicitly explore the
possibility of a post-Kantian mathesis, and that Deleuze,
the great 'contemporary' French philosopher, takes them up on it,
suggests that the question of the meaning of mathesis needs to be
posed from scratch. Kantian philosophy may have killed
'intellectual intuition' -- but did it kill mathesis?

I do not attempt to answer any of these questions in this essay,
the primary purpose of which is to provide some basic historical
information about Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, whose life turns
out to be almost as bizarre and fascinating as his ideas. The aim
here is to sketch out the background and context of Malfatti's life
and thought, not to attempt a philosophical analysis of his ideas,
nor of the details of his possible influences on Deleuze's
thought.9 His ideas are frankly
so strange that a basic reality-check on his existence and
movements needs to be carried out before any further examination of
his work. The first section looks at Malfatti's background in
medicine and Schellingian Naturphilosophie, while the
second section looks at the context for his turn to esotericism in
Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge. In the
concluding section, I make some suggestive remarks about Deleuze's
relationship to Malfatti and occultism.

Johann Malfatti de Montereggio and Romantic Medicine

Malfatti was born in Italy in 1775 and in the last decade of the
eighteenth century commenced a study of medicine under Luigi
Galvani in Bologna. Galvani had devised the famous experiment in
which the limbs of frogs were electrically stimulated to produce
contractions; but he had insisted that the electricity originated
in the animal rather than in the metal conductors which supported
it, and his opponent Volta was proved right. Malfatti, however,
remained devoted to Galvani, who is discussed and lauded in the
second essay of Anarchy and Hierarchy. In 1795 Malfatti
moved to Vienna to work at the General Hospital, under Joseph
Frank, who was his next major influence. Frank was an enthusiastic
follower of the medical theories of John Brown (1735-1798), whose
drug-based therapy was taken up with great enthusiasm by physicians
influenced by Romanticism, and in the first years of the nineteenth
century, by Schelling himself. It is essential to understand a
little about 'Brunonian' medicine if we are to understand
Malfatti's background.

John Brown was a theologian who turned his attention to medicine
after having discovered the healing properties of opium, which he
used to cure his gout. He had had little medical training when he
wrote the Elements of Medicine, published in 1790 in two
volumes of church Latin. His basic idea was that organisms should
not be treated on the mechanical model as conduits for external
excitations, but that they also have an internal
excitability. What the doctor should do is evaluate the
combination of degrees of internal excitability with the quantities
of external stimulus received. Living beings respond to external
and internal stimuli: external exciting powers include heat, wine
and poisons, while internal stimuli arise from the bodily
functions. Pathology can be treated as a result of overstimulation
(sthenia) or understimulation (asthenia). Overstimulation leads to
an exhaustion of the internal quantity of excitability, while
understimulation leaves quantities of the intrinsic activity of the
organism unused. 'Health' emerges when the appropriate quantity of
stimulation is found for the patient. One of Brown's well-known
dicta was that 'Life is a forced state; if the exciting
powers are withdrawn, death ensues as certainly as when the
excitability is gone' (Brown 1795: I, cxxvii). Since the organism
necessarily depends on stimuli from the external world, the state
of balance must be achieved rather than presupposed, and
disease is to be treated by supporting the self-regulating power of
the organism.10

Brown thought that most illness was caused by lack of
stimulation, which could be remedied with various means, ranging
from spirituous liquors, alkaloids such as ether, while 'highest of
all, as far as experiments have yet thrown light upon the subject,
is opium' (Brown 1795: I, 107-8). He specifically used liquid
laudanum, also known then as the 'wine of the Turks'. Brown
disagreed with prevailing opinion that opium was a sedative, citing
its use by Turkish soldiers as a counter-example. He claimed that
opium was the best treatment for gout, as well as numerous other
disorders. 'Opium is not a sedative; on the contrary, as it is the
most powerful of all the agents that support life, and that restore
health, and a truly blessed remedy, to the divine virtue of which
the lives of so many mortals have been owing, and in future, will
be owing; so it must be identified that spasms and convulsions,
over which it has such great power, do not consist in increased,
but diminished excitement, and that opium cures them by the same
operation by which it cures any other of the diseases, depending on
debility' (Brown 1795: I, 241). Almost a hundred years after the
Western criminalisation of drugs, it is hard for us to imagine how
easily available and widely consumed drugs like opium and hashish
were in the nineteenth century. For centuries, opium in particular
had been in common use in Europe as a universal panacea (for
instance, a census in 312 AD in Rome revealed 793 shops selling
opium in the city of Rome alone; Escohotado 1996: 20). In the
nineteenth century opium was even regularly administered to
children (under brand names such as Atkinson's Infant's
Preservative, or Street's Infant Quietness) (Kohn 1987: 54),
although the practice was also condemned by some physicians.
Although the addictive properties of opium had long been known (see
Lewin 1924: 27-74), and accounts such as Quincey's Confessions
of an Opium Eater (1821) were widely read, it was not until a
decade or so after the invention of morphine, during the 1830s --
and then, even more decisively, after the derivation of heroin in
1874 -- that opiates began to cause widespread visible death and
destruction across Europe and beyond.11 During the first half of the nineteenth century,
a large body of medical opinion (dating its lineage back to figures
such as Thomas Sydenham in the seventeenth century and beyond)
still held strongly to the view that opium was essential to
medicine, and should be harnessed and put to more precise use for a
variety of ailments, rather than legally prohibited. Although
contemporary reports of Brown's behaviour suggest that he was in
fact a total, almost maniacal, opium addict,12 the aim of the Elements of Medicine --
to transform the problem of opium through the creation of a
'science' of dosages -- would nevertheless have been granted a
welcome even by many sober-minded doctors working in Britain at the
end of the eighteenth century.

At the turn of the nineteenth century Brown's work suddenly
gained rapid popularity in some parts of Germany and Austria,
through the efforts of Andreas Röschlaub and Adalbert
Marcus, who ran the hospital in Bamberg in northern Bavaria. They
developed their own Erregbarkeitstheorie (excitability
theory) on Brunonian principles. Röschlaub showed that
Brunonian 'excitability' was different in kind to Haller's more
mechanical theory of 'Reiz' (irritability'), to which it bore some
resemblance. The difference was that Brown posited an internal
excitability which is actualised by the reception of stimuli; the
response to stimuli was therefore the combined product of the
stimuli and the internal excitability (Tsouyopoulos 1988: 67).
Stimulation does not only come from the outside, but also triggers
the powers of internal excitability. Quantitative measurements
therefore had to express a proportional relationship. The emergence
of Fichte's philosophy in 1794 provided another context for the
reception of Brown's ideas. 'Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre is
the theory of excitability', wrote Novalis, excitedly
(Werke 3: 383). Fichte's account of the relationship
between the 'I' and the 'not-I' found its biological correlate in
the relationship between the organism and its environment.

Schelling too came under Brown's influence, and saw in Brunonian
medicine the domain in contemporary science which was most suitable
to the development of Naturphilosophie. In 1799, the
German idealist movement in Jena had encountered a major setback
when Fichte was dismissed from the university of Jena on the charge
of atheism. Schelling, who was not under attack, left Jena in
solidarity with Fichte, and devoted himself for the next few years
to medicine, in which he had put his hopes for the development of
his version of idealist philosophy. 'If natural scientists are all
. . . priests of the powers of nature, still the physician guards
the sacred fire at the centre' (Werke 7, 131). His chosen
medical instructor was Röschlaub in Bamberg, where he
stayed before going on to Vienna, where the Brunonian movement was
also gaining force.13
Schelling's First Outline of a System of a Philosophy of
Nature (1799) was strongly influenced by Brown's ideas.

I have to say that Brown was the first to understand the
only true and genuine principles of all theories of organic
nature, insofar as he posited the ground of life in
excitability. Brown was the first who had had enough sense or
fortitude to propound that paradox of living phenomena, at all
times understood, but never articulated. He was the first
who understood that life consists neither in an absolute passivity
nor in an absolute activity, that life is a product of a potency
higher than the merely chemical, but without being supernatural,
i.e. a phenomenon submitted to no natural laws or natural forces
(Schelling 1799: 68).

In this important 1799 system, Schelling attempts to put
Brunonian medicine on a more solid Naturphilosophische
basis, 'deducing' the concept of excitability according to
transcendental principles. He also attempts to solve the problem of
whether opium is a stimulant or sedative by dialectical means
(ibid, 63; cf. 162). Schelling's own involvement with opium in this
period has not been well-documented, but certain inferences can be
made. It is known, for instance, that in 1800 Schelling prescribed
opium to Auguste Böhmer, the 16 year-old daughter of
his partner, Caroline Schlegel, who died as a result (Zeltner 1954:
36). Whether Schelling continued to use opium after this tragedy is
unclear, but his novel Clara, written after the death of
Caroline (1810), is full of implicit references to the
hallucinatory properties of opium.

Schelling found in Brown the materials for a dynamic account of
the development of the life-process. He suggested that his concept
of a 'formative drive' operating through biological evolution was
identical to Brown's: that 'organic formation happens only through
the mediation of the process of excitability' (Schelling
1799: 48) 14However, he
thought that Brown's apprehension of the principle of excitability
was 'discovered more through a lucky groping than deduced in a
scientific way', and stated that Röschlaub was the
only one of 'Brown's disciples [to] have understood the scientific
seeds which lie in his principles' (ibid, 68). Brown's own account
of the dynamic relationship between stimulation and excitability
could be confusing. For instance, overstimulation resulted in the
exhaustion of internal excitability, but the latter itself also
needed to be supported, and the prescription of stimulants was
therefore also necessary, so Brown's argument went, for
overstimulation as well as understimulation. Thus, rather than
calming over-excitation through bloodletting (as was still common),
one simply had to administer more opium. Schelling tried to elicit
the dialectical meaning of such apparent contradictions. The poles
of sthenia and asthenia as states of disease required that one
explain what a 'normal amount of excitability' was. Schelling
argued that as every individual organism is in a continual state of
self-reproduction, it requires a special 'rhythm', in which the
degrees of sensible receptivity and 'magnetic' activity are
balanced. Disease emerges when the rhythm of self-reproduction is
disturbed, and qualitative changes result in the organism (ibid
168-172; see Tsouyopoulos 1988).

Schelling's attempt to transmute 'Brunonian' medicine into a
system of Naturphilosophie in turn found its own
enthusiastic disciples in Vienna in the early years of the new
century. From a history of the Vienna Medical School in the
nineteenth century (Lesky 1965), we learn that Malfatti played a
leading role in this movement. Malfatti worked at the Vienna
Medical School as an assistant under Johann Peter Frank (and his
son Joseph). Lesky writes that under the Franks and Malfatti, 'the
so-called 'stimulating' medicines, opium, cinchona bark, camphor,
wine, etc, now dominated the therapy of the Vienna clinic', in
place of the customary purgatives, laxatives and expectorants
(Lesky 1965: 10). However, the new wave of Brunonian medicine soon
ran into problems after it emerged that mortality rates in the
Vienna General Hospital had risen as a result of its influence.
Patients were frequently to be found lying drunk in their beds,
after imbibing large, 'invigorating' doses of wine (ibid, 11).
Given Brown's fervent advocacy of opium, it is likely that Malfatti
and his cohorts were also deploying large quantities of that
substance. In Anarchy and Hierarchy, Malfatti explicitly
mentions the use of opium as a means of stimulating what he calls
'artificial fire' (Malfatti 1845: 194). 15 His deployment of alchemical ideas in the book
also suggests the use of more unusual compounds (such as arsenic
and mercury), but it is unlikely he was using these at the Vienna
Hospital; this side of his research was something he went on to
develop only later.

Despite the scandal at the hospital, Malfatti did not relinquish
Romantic medicine. He became a friend of Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler
(1780-1866), a follower of Schelling, whom he was stimulated to
study. The main publication by Schelling on medicine at this point
was the 1799 system, with its speculative appropriation of
Brunonian medicine. In 1809 Malfatti published his first major
work, Entwurf einer Pathogenie aus der Evolution und Revolution
des Lebens [Sketch of Pathogenesis from the Evolution and
Revolution of Life], which developed Schellingian
Naturphilosophie through the more practical medical ideas
of Brown and Röschlaub. Specifically, Malfatti
attempts to apply the principles of Schelling and Oken within the
sphere of human ontogeny. Prefaced by a long introduction in which
Malfatti discusses the current state of Naturphilosophie,
the aim of the work is to present a complete account of the
ontogeny of the human being, from 'The Life of the Fetus'
(Fötusleben), through childhood, youth,
maturity and old age, ending in 'Marasmus' (wasting-away).
Schelling's ideas about the self-productive nature of the organism,
along with his theory of 'metamorphosis', permit a determination of
the internal polarities and thresholds of transformation of each
stage of development. Already for Malfatti, the embryo is the
primary model of self-development, with spatial divisions arising
autonomously in the egg through polarisation of the liver and
brain. In The Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge, the
model of the embryo becomes completely dominant, and 'embryos' are
uncovered in the abdomen, the thoracic region, and even in the head
of the developing human being. The Sketch of Pathogenesis
is more conventional, albeit within the norms of early-nineteenth
century Naturphilosophie. Malfatti is concerned to
identify periodic rhythms within the body itself, for instance, the
cycle of respiration, sleeping and waking, the periodic sexual
impulses in male and female (on rhythm and type, cf. Malfatti 1809:
xxii). Each developmental stage has its own governing polarity, and
disequilibrium within this polarity is correlated with the tendency
towards particular pathologies. Each age has its own particular
diseases (childhood has its rickets and scrofula, youth phthisis
[tuberculosis or lung disease generally], maturity has arthritis,
old age scirrhus and cancer). The childhood propensity to rickets,
according to Malfatti, is due to 'the abnormally persisting
direction of the two predominant polarities of head and stomach,
brain and liver' (Malfatti 1809: 58; Lesky 1965: 39).

By all accounts after the publication of his first book Malfatti
went on to become highly sought-after as a physician. He was
physician to the brother and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, as well
as Napoleon II, the Duke of Reichstadt.16 He is said to have had an outstanding reputation
as a doctor, and in 1815 the foreign heads of state who convened
for the Congress of Vienna reputedly benefited from sessions with
Malfatti (Altman 1999: 84). The fact that Malfatti gained such
success as a physician to royalty, nobility and politicians using a
Brunonian system of medicine suggests that, if Schelling's
Naturphilosophische transmutation of Brunonian medicine
failed to achieve acceptance in the subsequent 'official' history
of science and medicine, it found a comfortable niche as a system
of medicine for élites. Perhaps it remained a more or
less 'secret' system of medicine, until it was discovered and
developed by the French Martinists at the end of the century.

From 1809 until 1817, Malfatti was Beethoven's doctor. The
composer and the doctor enjoyed a close but turbulent relationship,
and Malfatti attended the master at his death-bed. Given Malfatti's
development of Schelling's appropriation of Brunonianism, we can
imagine Malfatti preparing an elaborate system of invigorating and
intoxicating potions for Beethoven in this period (which coincides
with the end of the second period in the composer's development and
the beginning of the experimental final period). In 1814, Beethoven
wrote a cantata for his doctor (Un lieto brindisi, Werke
ohne Opuszahl, 103); 'Für Elise' was written for
Malfatti's niece, Therèse. However, in 1816, Beethoven
began to develop the peculiar illness which was to plague him until
his death. There remains continuing doubt about the nature of the
illness, but Gail Altman has noted that its symptoms are consistent
with arsenic poisoning. Whispers about Beethoven's condition of
mind persisted throughout his lifetime, but these rumours reached a
pitch in 1817, 'when the Master showed a high degree of
excitability and his behaviour and appearance deteriorated' (Nettl
1957: 99). In April 1817, there is a sudden breaking off of
relations with Malfatti, who Beethoven then went on to denounce in
a letter as a 'sly Italian [ein pfiffiger italiener] [who]
had powerful secondary motives [so starke Nebenabsichten]
where I was concerned and lacked both honesty
[Redlichkeit]and insight [Einsicht]' (Letter of
June 19, 1817 to Countess Erdödy; in Beethoven 1961:
II, 683). Nevertheless, Beethoven returned to Malfatti for help in
1827 during his final illness. Malfatti prescribed the ailing
Beethoven a mixture of rum, tea and sugar, and Beethoven wrote
'Miracle of miracles! . . . Only through Malfatti's science shall I
be saved' (cited in Thayer 1921: 1032). However, Beethoven soon
began to overindulge in the frozen punch, and died a few months
later. The possibility that Malfatti correctly saw that Beethoven's
illness was incurable and therefore tacitly licensed his
overindulgence in the punch should not be ruled out, and in fact
this is how Thayer presents it in his life of Beethoven (Thayer
1921: 1032). This in turn leads to the possibility that the reason
for Beethoven's break with Malfatti was a conflict over dosages;
Beethoven may have been overindulging in 1816-17, which would have
been linked with his change in behaviour and appearance.

In 1816, Malfatti took up Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism in
a modified Naturphilosophische version. 'He had meanwhile
become a practitioner very much in demand in Vienna . . . and
treated patients suffering from paralysis and chronic singultus by
magnetic healing but without a baquet' (Lesky 1965: 31).17 In 1817 Malfatti became personal
physician to the Archduchess Beatrix of Este, and was sent by the
Viennese court to investigate animal magnetism in the clinic of
K.C. Wolfart, a follower of Mesmer who had set up a state
subsidised clinic in Berlin for the magnetic treatment of the poor
(Gauld 1992: 89). In 1831, he was asked by Metternich, the Austrian
prime minister, to care for his seriously ill son. In 1834, there
is record of a visit to the Catholic theosophist Franz von Baader,
with whom he discussed the decadence of medicine due to
materialism. Both von Baader and Malfatti saw in animal magnetism
the proof of the incorrectness of materialism, but agreed that
Mesmer himself had been an 'arch-materialist' whose therapy could
only be understood properly within Schellingian pantheism (Faivre
1996: 53). In 1837, Malfatti was honoured by the Austrian
government, and became a member of the nobility (an
Edler). He became the first president of the Viennese
Society of Doctors (Gesellschaft der Ärzte),
founded in 1837 (Schönbauer 1944: 403). In 1845, when
he was seventy years old, he published Studies on the Anarchy
and Hierarchy of Knowledge. In Anarchy and Hierarchy,
Malfatti recalls presenting his ideas on mathesis in 1841 in a
speech at the end of his term as president of the Viennese
Gesellschaft (Malfatti 1845: 7).

Despite Malfatti's ongoing success with members of
élite society, a series of his patients appear to have
mysteriously died in his care. No doubt our first suspicions will
be directed at the notorious Brunonian system of medicine itself.
However, the truth may not be so simple. Malfatti is suspected of
being a state assassin in Gail Altman's historical 'whodunnit',
Fatal Links: The Curious Deaths of Beethoven and the Two
Napoleons (1999). According to Altman, Malfatti poisoned
Beethoven, diluting lead into the punch, dispatching both
Napoleon's sister and the Duke of Reichstadt in similar ways.
Altman suggests that Malfatti was working for the Austrian
government (who had interests in suppressing the Duke), and that
this explains how he remained unscathed, becoming a wealthy and
respected figure in the nobility, even after a series of his
high-profile patients had expired (Altman 1999: 83-90, 181-205).
She concludes that Malfatti is the prime suspect in 'the crime of
the nineteenth century' (196).

One starts to feel that there something a little too perfect
about that name, Malfatti, with its literal meaning of
'ill-fashioned', and its semantic resonances (mal fati . .
. 'bad deeds'?, 'ill fated'?, or just 'badly made'?). Who
was this character? Was he one of the biggest medical
buffoons in history, accidentally killing the greatest composer in
the West? Was he a state assassin? Or was he in fact just
an excellent Brunonian doctor, who unsuspectingly exposed the
disastrous shortcomings and dangers of Brunonianism as a 'system'
of medicine? Let us note only that in late 2005, a sample of
Beethoven's hair showed the presence of vast quantities of lead,
thus appearing to confirm the theory that he was poisoned.
Beethoven forums on the internet are currently alive with
speculations about the doings of the sinister Doctor Malfatti. But
the truth may be more complicated than Gail Altman makes out. Her
thesis is highly speculative, and overlooks the possibility that
Malfatti's 'poisoning' of his clients could be the result of
overzealous application of Brunonian medicine, mixed with
alchemical recipes involving toxic minerals. For instance, if
arsenic were detected in Beethoven's remains, that would not
necessarily mean that he was deliberately poisoned by it. Although
arsenic was indeed the poison of choice at this time, it was used
as an aphrodisiac and for health reasons, as well as having a long
tradition of alchemical use.18
It seems possible that arsenic, along with other toxic substances,
might have served as elixirs in Malfatti's pharmacy, to be used in
carefully regulated dosages, rather than as poisons. Whether the
lead found in Beethoven's hair can be traced back to Malfatti will
be a very difficult question to answer, and is complicated by the
fact that Malfatti's medicine was by this point (1827) already
highly unorthodox.

We leave aside now the question of whether Malfatti was
responsible for the 'crime of the nineteenth century'. More
research needs to be done. The tantalising report that the European
heads of state paid him a visit at an international congress in
1817 certainly raises the possibility at least that Malfatti played
an important role in an system of medicine for use by
élites, the risks of which might indeed have been
known by those who felt it necessary to take them, in order to gain
and/or maintain power, be it creative or political. However,
Malfatti's turn in the 1830s to mesmerism and theosophy,
culminating in the publication of Anarchy and Hierarchy,
is still unaccounted for. The next section aims to bring to light
the historical background of Malfatti's transition from Brunonian
Naturphilosophie in the Sketch of a Pathogenesis
to the extravagant theosophical theories of mathesis that
characterise Anarchy and Hierarchy.

Malfatti and the Esoteric Turn of German Idealism

In 1806, Schelling made the acquaintance of the Franz von Baader
(1765-1841), who at that time doubled as an engineer and as a vocal
advocate for the introduction of the theosophical thinking of
Böhme, Saint-Martin and the German mystical tradition
into Catholic thought and practice. For Baader, the term
'theosophy' indicated a world-view in which human consciousness is
understood as the coming to consciousness of God himself. In
Böhme's theosophy, the course of the world, its
development in nature and history, was understood as the
manifestation of a drama taking place in God himself. Baader had
found in Böhme a means of experiencing the life of
God, and thus achieving a version of the intellectual intuition
apparently excluded by Kant. Baader also introduced the discussion
of sexuality into theosophy. In an article published in Schelling's
Jahrbücher in 1808, Baader suggested that
there is an analogy between knowing and sexuality, and that sexual
instinct and consciousness contains a neglected key to cognition.
He went on to develop an elaborate theory of love, in which the
image of the hermaphrodite served as the symbol of the divine union
achieved through the sexual act (see Betanzos 1998).

In the famous 1809 essay on human freedom Schelling appealed to
Böhme and Baader for a conception of pantheism which
could, unlike Spinoza's, take account of the existence of freedom
and the choice of good and evil. The answer was to treat human
freedom as a replication of God's own inner struggle between
radical selfhood (evil, wrath) and universality (the good, love).
'Wrath' [Zorn] was a divine force rather than a human
weakness, and 'love' was the elementary form of universality. As
Thomas O' Meara showed in his 1982 work Romantic Idealism and
Roman Catholicism, subtitled Schelling and the
Theologians, Baader's influence was decisive for Schelling. 'I
know a man who is by nature a subterranean man', he wrote glowingly
of Baader at one point during these years, 'in whom knowing has
become solid reality; in whom knowing has become being, just as in
metals sound and light receive mass' (O'Meara 1982: 84; 'Kritische
Fragmente', in Werke 7: 247). In 1806, under the influence
of Baader, Schelling had announced his renunciation of the Fichtean
epistemological approach to philosophy, stating that he now was not
afraid to stand in 'the company of mystics' (O'Meara 1982: 84;
Werke 7, 120). From 1806 onwards, Schelling became fully
immersed in the occult, working on somnambulism and 'clairvoyance'.
His later philosophy, culminating in the monumental 'Philosophy of
Mythology', was to be dominated by theosophy. Following Baader, his
Erzeugungsdialektik or theory of potency/power, became
more centred around the model of the reproductive act (see Beach
1994 for an account of Schelling's theory of potencies). However,
Schelling's ambivalence towards Christianity became a point of
increasing disagreement between the two thinkers. For Baader,
theosophy was ultimately a self-revelation of the Christian God.
Schelling, on the other hand, increasingly tended to treat all
religions and mythology, whether Christian, Persian or Indian, as
equally justified within their own sphere of historical
development. Baader saw through Schelling's claim that the
dialectic of mythologies terminated in an overcoming of mythology
itself in the internalised conscience of Christianity. Schelling
had in fact refashioned the notion of 'revelation' by developing
the hermetic idea that the only revelation is to be found in the
recapitulation in the mind of cosmic and civilizational history,
with mythology as a guide. Baader was also irritated that Schelling
had taken to mocking Saint-Martin in his lectures (O'Meara 1982:
134).19 He rejected the late
Schelling's development of theosophy as barbarous and pagan. 'The
light of Christ', he said, 'did not come from the swamp of
mythology' (ibid).

In his 1809 Sketch of Pathogenesis, Malfatti was
already noting Roschläub's tendencies towards
'theosophical' thinking (Malfatti 1809: v).
Roschläub was trying to follow Schelling on his
increasingly erratic path (Tsouypoulos 1982: 27). Schelling had
presented the German-speaking Brunonians with a philosophical
deployment of Brunonianism, but had himself then gone on to throw
himself into mysticism and theosophy. For several years, Schelling
had been following the ideas and practices of the Brunonian doctors
-- but could the Brunonians now follow him into theosophy? In 1845,
with Anarchy and Hierarchy, Malfatti at last outdoes any
previous attempt at synthesising Romantic Naturphilosophie
and theosophy, with results unprecedented in either medicine or in
the history of religious thought. Malfatti rejects the residual
traces of Christianity in Schelling, and traces the origins of
theosophical thought back to Hindu mysticism, which is the origin,
he claims, of a mysterious, ecstatic technique of thinking he calls
mathesis. Malfatti tells us that the 'mother-idea' of his later
studies is 'the unity of science' as spelled out in 'the mystical
Organon of mathesis of the Indians' (Malfatti 1845:
xxvii). In his opening remarks to the first study, on mathesis
itself, he asserts that metaphysics and mathematics originally
maintained a living unity in ancient India. If we look hard enough,
we can find in mathematics the 'mute debris of a spiritual
monument' (ibid, 6). Mathematics did not begin as a formal science,
but functioned as an essential part of an integrated system of
esoteric knowledge and ecstatic practice. The numerical decad, and
the forms generated within and from it, were originally related to
a system of occult anatomy, in which the vital forces that rule the
body were ordered hierarchically in polarities, potencies and
planes. The purpose of mathesis was to articulate bodily
forces numerically, identifying their points of threshold and
transformation, and relating them back to macrocosmic patterns in
the evolving universe. What Malfatti has to say about Indian
mysticism is rooted in ideas from the Tantric tradition of Indian
mysticism, the great sexo-cosmic system which took hold of Medieval
India for several centuries before undergoing convulsion and
dissolution at around the time of the flowering of the European
Renaissance.20 Malfatti puts
Schelling's emphasis on Erzeugung [procreation] right at
the centre of his system, taking the concept at both sexual and
metaphysical levels, attempting to find the pathways between the
two. He continually focusses on the sexual and ecstatic aspects of
Indian mysticism, laying out a vast sexualised ontology,
culminating (as in Baader's system) in the 'hermaphroditic'
consciousness of the human sexual act. In Anarchy and
Hierarchy it is as if Schelling's final theosophy comes to
completion in a hallucinatory Tantrism, in which the living body of
God, in its most complete self-development, itself appears in
hermaphroditic form in human sexuality, where the
coming-to-divine-consciousness becomes identical to the
psychosexual attainment, along Tantric lines, of spiritual
'bisexuality'. This 'system', uncovered by Malfatti, is said to
form the basis for all subsequent Eastern and Western esoteric
thought, and now furnishes us with the long-lost key to the
ultimate system of medicine.

German Romanticism had had a long-standing fascination with
Indian tradition, beginning with Herder and reaching an early high
point with Friedrich Schlegel's Language and the Wisdom of the
Indians (1808); Malfatti refers to Schlegel's work as an
influence.21 In his
Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling describes the triad of
Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu as exemplifications of his three primary
divine powers. Schelling did not give primacy to any one world
religion, and thus treated the Indian trimurti as parallel
to the Egyptian triad of Typhon, Osiris and Horus, and indeed the
Christian trinity of God, Son and Holy Spirit.22 Malfatti is more reckless in suggesting that
there is one universal philosophy which emanates first of
all from Indian mysticism, and then repeats itself in different
forms throughout the history of religion, through the Neo-Platonism
of Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite, down to Böhme
and Saint-Martin. This conviction that something eternal is
repeated by various 'initiates' throughout history is a background
assumption of Malfatti's book, as well as of the esoteric and
occult traditions in general. The influence of Friedrich Creuzer's
idealist history of religion, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten
Völker (1810-12) is also apparent.23Creuzer had claimed that there was
originally one prehistoric religion, systematised by a caste of
Oriental priests, who had deliberately veiled their doctrines in
symbols; the cult had travelled through Egypt and arrived in
Greece, where it underwent a degradation into
anthropomorphism.24 Although
Malfatti refers to a number of sources apart from Creuzer he
adheres to Creuzer's hypothesis that a 'primordial revelation' in
the Orient is at the root of all world religions.

But Malfatti's main source for Indian religion is Niklas
Müller's Glauben, Wissen und Kunst der alten
Hindus [The Beliefs, Science and Art of the Ancient
Hindus] (1822). The illustrations of Hindu deities and figures
which appear unchanged in Anarchy and Hierarchy are but a
small selection from over a hundred remarkable engravings appended
to Müller's volume, with detailed explications.
Niklas Müller (1770-1851) worked as a curator at the
municipal art gallery at Mainz, writing local histories alongside
erudite works on Indian religion and Mithraism (Kucharski 1968: 2).
His 1822 work on Indian philosophy, religion and art is immense and
bizarre. Despite the acknowledged influence of Creuzer and
Görres, his approach is original, and is structured
around a highly metaphysical and detailed account of the
relationships between Hindu deities, based on their place in a
system of emanations. On this basis, there are lengthy discussions
of cosmic sexuality (cf. Müller 1822: 299-332),
including references to 'Shakti-energy' (323) which foreshadow
Malfatti's later sexo-cosmic ideas. The twelfth chapter deals with
the theme of 'inner Doubling' [innern Entzweiung], rooted
in the struggle of two cosmic founding principles of primal good
and primal evil (ibid, 463). The fundamental idea that the human
being is 'duplex' all the way up, from its physiology up to the
hermaphroditic consciousness of sexual activity, is central in
Malfatti's book, finding its fullest exposition in the final
chapter on the 'Double Sex' implied by hermaphroditic
consciousness.

The inaugural character of Malfatti's Anarchy and
Hierarchy comes from its attempt to synthesise Indian
religious ideas with contemporary ideas about somnambulism. Neither
'history of religion', nor 'medicine', Malfatti's text stands at
the origin of the attempts of nineteenth century occultism to
combine ancient lore with contemporary theories of somnambulism.
His guiding claim is that modern Naturphilosophie, in
conjunction with contemporary theories of mesmerism, is the
condition of possibility for the rediscovery of the powers of
ecstatic healing first discovered in Indian occultism.

That which, in the contemplation of life, was attained in
principle through the mortification of the senses, by the abasement
of the individual, has been subject in our times (although rarely
with enough purity and elevation) through the means of a sort of
artificial anticipation of death (animal magnetism). The same fact
has long been observed in the case of fortuitous alterations of
health, which have for their particular effect the concentration
and momentary elevation of the somatic life of the individual. In
the first case it is called artificial somnambulism, in the second
case spontaneous somnambulism (Malfatti 1845: 5).

For Malfatti, the process of self-healing through natural and
artificial somnambulism involves the liberation of the same forces
deployed in the occult anatomy of Tantric mysticism. But the
Indians had also had the advantage of the 'admirable mystical
Organon of mathesis' as the means to articulate a theosophical
anatomy. Contemporary nature-philosophical medicine, he argued,
should therefore return to Indian tradition in order to exploit the
discoveries opened up by recent research into somnambulism. For
whereas conscious thought is normally determined by
self-consciousness, if consciousness is relaxed through natural or
artificial somnambulism, then the single-minded apprehension of
psychic tendencies which are usually unconscious becomes possible,
allowing in turn for the production of a higher synthesis of
cognition. Malfatti's Anarchy and Hierarchy is an attempt
to control the power of dreams, to harness what Coleridge called
the 'somniacal magic . . . superinduced in the active powers of the
mind' during states of artificially induced somnambulism (Coleridge
1838: III, 397). 'What an astonishing advantage man has drawn from
the night-side of his life', remarks Malfatti in a passage that is
still to be found echoing in Deleuze's late essay 'To Have Done
with Judgment' (Deleuze 1993: 130): 'to open up through sleep
[sommeil], by means of a state of interior vigil (the
vigil of sleep [laveille du sommeil]), the
highest, most hidden astral region: this is what the magnetic
development of clairvoyance and ecstasy demonstrates to us, in the
same way as the natural life of dreams' (Malfatti 1845: 153).

Malfatti's Anarchy and Hierarchy inhabits the
borderline between medicine (albeit of an unorthodox kind) and
occultism. If Guénon is right to assert the influence
of Malfatti on later occultism, this is not only due to his
syncretic combination of numerology, Hermetism and Indian religion,
but also due to his explicit discussion and deployment of drugs in
the production of 'artificial somnambulism'. We find traces here of
a historical bifurcation between 'occultism' and 'esotericism'.
Whereas occultists like Stanislas de Guaita, Papus and Paul
Sédir (in his Les plantes magiques, 1902)
wrote explicitly about the role of drugs in attaining altered or
'higher' consciousness, the 'esotericist' tradition tended to cast
its gaze away from the haunted, half-swamped avenues explored by
the psychopharmacological alchemist. Although Malfatti did not
think of himself as an occultist, it is not impossible to see how
his original synthesis of drug-experimentation with Indian ideas of
'subtle' anatomy might have inspired the adventures of a revived
'occultism' at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Deleuze and Occultism

We have seen that Malfatti's influence was felt at a number of
'singular' points in the development of modern thought and culture,
in the fields of music and medicine, and in
fin-de-siècle occultism. The history of the
real and manifold influence of the post-Schellingian vein of
'occultism' on later nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought
and culture has yet to be written. The names of the founding
figures of modern occultism -- Malfatti and Wronski -- remain
almost unknown, and Deleuze was unusual for referring to them at
all. To what extent, then, might the ideas of Malfatti have
continued to influence or inform Deleuze's 'mature' philosophy?
Because of the difficulty of Malfatti's central work, Anarchy
and Hierarchy, and the need for a relatively detailed
preliminary analysis of the means for evaluating works of this
nature,25 it is not possible to
attempt here any substantive comparison of Malfatti's and Deleuze's
theses. 'Mathesis, Science and Philosophy', Deleuze's text on
Malfatti, moreover, is often gnomic in itself, particularly in its
passages on the meaning of 'initiation'.26The following remarks merely attempt to suggest,
as minimally and gently as possible, that some of Deleuze's ideas
might be rendered more intelligible by being related back to the
modern European occult tradition.27

For evidence, let us refer to just one of Deleuze's last essays,
'To Have Done with Judgment' (1993). In this essay -- which makes
no bones about being highly spooked -- Deleuze is to be found
inhabiting the same border zone between medicine and magic as his
old friend Doctor Malfatti. 'To Have Done with Judgment' presents
four interconnected practices that Deleuze holds to be essential
for a proposed ethics that will break with 'Judeo-Christian'
morality and (in the words of Antonin Artaud) 'have done with the
judgment of God'. Alongside 'power' and the capacity for 'combat',
Deleuze proposes that visionary drug experience and occult anatomy
serve as privileged means for escaping 'the consciousness of being
in debt to the deity' which, he says (following Nietzsche), is the
basic condition of the system of 'judgment' (Deleuze 1993: 126).
The conjunction of drug-experience, on the one hand, and occult
anatomy, on the other, installs us firmly back within the context
of modern occultism. Distinct echoes of the young Deleuze's early
encounter with Malfatti can be heard, as he retraces in this piece
the path from visionary drug experience to occult anatomy. Deleuze
was one of the few philosophers to continue the tradition of
psychedelic experimentation whose last great philosophical
proponent was William James. There are a number of passages in his
work which discuss drug-experimentation (see Boothroyd 2006:
155-85). In an article published in 1975 for the French
Encyclopedia Universalis, 'Schizophrenia and Society',
Deleuze made a case for the importance of psychopharmacology in the
study of psychopathology.28 In
passages of A Thousand Plateaus, however, and 'To Have
Done with Judgment', the themes of drug-experience and occultism
are re-united once more, as they were in Malfatti. Drug
intoxication, Deleuze tells us, can harness the power of dreams,
through mastery of what he calls sommeil (a term which is
inaccurately translated as 'sleep' in English). Peyote rites, for
instance, 'are not dreams, but states of intoxication or
sommeil'. There exists, says Deleuze, a 'dreamless
sommeil in which one nonetheless does not fall asleep
[dormer]'; and, moreover, 'such is the state of Dionysian
intoxication' (Deleuze 1993: 130).29 Then, immediately after this passage, so
evocative of Malfatti's own description of the powers of
sommeil, Deleuze proceeds to imply that the basis of his
own theory of the 'body without organs' lies in ideas of occult
anatomy, indirectly derived from the tradition of Tantrism. 'The
body without organs', he begins, 'is an affective, intensive,
anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds,
and gradients'. He states that D.H. Lawrence 'paints a picture of
such a body, with the sun and moon as its poles, with its planes,
its sections, and its plexuses' (Deleuze 1993: 131). This is the
sole example given, alongside a brief reference to Artaud's use of
the notion (which is also occult-influenced). Deleuze is referring
here to Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923),
which contains a chapter entitled 'Plexuses, Planes and so on', an
account of the 'subtle body', made up of a 'vital magnetism'
organised in dynamic polarities.30 Lawrence's account of the chakras in
this chapter, however, is itself derived, according to William York
Tindall (1949; confirmed by Montgomery 1994), from another piece of
occultism, a Tantric interpretation of the Book of Revelation no
less -- The Apocalypse Unsealed, published in 1910 by
James Pryse, an associate of Madame Blavatsky's group of
Theosophists. Pryse reads the Book of Revelation as a veiled
account of occult anatomy, derived from ancient Tantric
sources.31 He attempts to relate
each of the symbols of the Revelation back to the 'intensive
self-evolution' of esoteric practice.32 Although it is impossible to argue that Lawrence's
account of the body in Fantasia of the Unconscious (not to
mention his own Apocalypse of 1931) is entirely derived
from and/or entirely consistent with Pryse's own version of Tantric
theosophy, it shares many of the same premises. Even though
Lawrence devotes himself to shaking off the faith in a secret
'Tradition' that is a recurring motif in occultist thought, his
account of the 'subtle', 'intensive' body is structurally similar
to the theories of occult anatomy advanced by both Pryse and
Malfatti.

The similarity of the occult anatomies of Lawrence, Pryse and
Malfatti may be due to the fact that each indirectly refers itself
back to ideas derived from Indian occultism; alternatively, the
structural identity may arise due to an approximation of practices
between each of the three thinkers. Either way, it would be unwise
to ignore the textual connections between Deleuze's 'body without
organs' and occult ideas of the 'subtle body'. Again, it is
impossible to argue that Deleuze's account of the body without
organs in 'To Have Done with Judgment' is derived from
and/or fully consistent with any of the versions of occult
anatomy held by Lawrence, Pryse or Malfatti. Lawrence only 'paints
a picture' of the Body without Organs; there could be any number of
pictures and even portraitists of this peculiar 'Body'. But it is
hard to escape the impression that some passages of the late
Deleuze do seem to carry the last, dying and frenzied echoes of the
European occult tradition. After having directed the reader in
search of a picture of the 'body without organs' to Lawrence's text
on plexuses and planes, Deleuze states: 'this nonorganic vitality
is the relation of the body to the imperceptible forces and powers
that seize hold of it, or that it seizes hold of, just as the moon
takes hold of a woman's body' (Deleuze 1993: 131). It is difficult
to imagine a more arcane utterance; it sounds like something out of
Lévi's Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic.

In order be able to assess the possible influence (or not) of
occultism on Deleuze, and on modern thought in general, we need to
be open to reconceiving our ideas about the history of modern
European philosophy, its relation to practical techniques which put
in question the traditional division between body and mind, and to
systems of 'medicine' that have more in common with Renaissance
magic or Indian occultism than with any current Western conceptions
of medicine.

Notes

1 Called 'Jean' in the
French translation; sometimes also called 'Giovanni'.

2 The French bibliography
of Deleuze's writings published at the end of The Desert
Island, a collection of early articles omits all texts
published prior to 1953, apparently in accordance with wishes
expressed by Deleuze prior to his death. However, an English
bibliography by Timothy Murphy lists the missing articles (Murphy
1996). These writings are on quite disparate subjects. They begin
with two somewhat libido-soaked musings on sexuality, centred
around a pronounced cult of woman (e.g. 'Description of a Woman',
'Statements and Profiles'). See Keith W. Faulkner's translations of
these articles in Angelaki 7:3 (2002) and 8:3 (2003)
respectively, and his commentary on them (Faulkner 2002). The other
articles are 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie', published in the
literary journal Espace, which combines esoteric, elitist
political ideas with a dialectical account of the relationship of
Christian 'interiority' and modern capitalist bourgeois
subjectivity; and an introduction to Diderot's La
Religieuse from 1947. All these texts are extremely
interesting and deserve further study; there may even be a
fundamental unity to these writings as a group. But it is arguably
the introduction to Malfatti's Mathesis that is the most
interesting for Deleuze scholars, for both Deleuze's introduction
and, more intriguingly, Malfatti's own work, shed unexpected light
on some of the more obscure concepts of Deleuze's philosophy. David
Reggio has posted a draft translation of Deleuze's Malfatti piece
online (see Reggio 2003).

3 It still contains a 1849
preface by a Polish Messianist, Christian Ostrowski. See Reggio
2003.

4 See the philosophical
chapter of Papus's What is Occultism?, translated into
English in 1913 (Papus 1900). In his article on Malfatti, David
Reggio notes that another Martinist, Paul Sédir, gave
lectures on Malfatti at the turn of the century to the Amities
spirituelles organisation in Paris (Reggio 2003).

5 Papus claimed to have
been initiated into Martinism in 1882 by a mesmerist, Henri Delaage
(1825-1882). Guaita is the more enigmatic figure, and became
notorious when Joris-Karl Huysmans broadcasted allegations that
Guaita had killed another French wizard (the Abbé
Boullan) in a magical feud. (He denied this allegation, claiming
that Boullan had died of natural causes). Guaita wrote a massive
(and unfinished) attempt at a synthesis of occult philosophy,
The Serpent of Genesis, based on the ideas of Jakob
Böhme and Eliphas Lévi among others; the
last chapter of the third volume was to be devoted to mathesis, but
he died of a morphine overdose at the age of 36. Guaita also
possessed a copy of the 1849 French edition of Malfatti's
Mathesis, which is described as 'extremely curious and
rare' in the auction catalogue of his occult library (Philipon
1899: 85). David Allen Harvey's recent survey of Martinism,
Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern
France (2005) gives a lucid and colourful account of the
movement and its influences. The Martinists were extremely prolific
for about two decades, with two journals, L'Initiation and
La Voile d'Isis, and groups spreading as far afield as
Italy and Russia. L'Initiation was founded in 1888 and
continued until 1914. There was also an offshoot of Martinism, the
Gnostic Catholic Church, which attempted to bring about a return to
more Gnostic ideas about the relation of spirit to matter. For this
church, the way of salvation lay through the two extremes of
libertinism or asceticism. However, the popularity of these
movements did not survive the first world war, which claimed the
lives of many of the key players.

6 The medievalist
Marie-Madeleine Davy edited a series entitled 'Sources and Fires'
[Sources et feux] for Griffon d'Or. Deleuze had dedicated his
article 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie' to her, and had attended
intellectual soirées hosted by her during and after
the war (also attended by Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan and Jean
Paulhan). In the book series directed by her are listed a book on
palmistry (with a preface by Davy herself), Cyrille Wilczkowski's
Man and the Zodiac: Essay on Typological Synthesis,
selections from Paracelsus, Jean Richer's 1947 book on the esoteric
significance of the works of Gérard de Nerval,
Strindberg's Inferno and, rather on its own, Lucien
Goldmann's Man, Community and the World in the Philosophy of
Immanuel Kant.

7 Many of the artists and
writers Deleuze is interested in (for example, Artaud, Castaneda,
late D.H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Mallarmé, Michaux,
Stockhausen, Villiers de l'Isle Adam) have strong interests in
occultism.

8 Although Eliphas
Lévi is often held to have inaugurated the French
occult revival in 1855 with his Doctrine and Ritual of High
Magic (translated into English as Transcendental
Magic), Lévi was himself first initiated into the
occult by Wronski; prior to the year he spent with Wronski, he had
been a utopian socialist (Chacornac 1926: 131-139; McIntosh 1972:
96-100; Williams 1975: 66-70). In an obituary for Wronski,
Lévi wrote that he had 'placed, in this century of
universal and absolute doubt, the hitherto unshakeable basis of a
science at once human and divine. First and foremost, he had dared
to define the essence of God and to find, in this definition
itself, the law of absolute movement and of universal creation'
(cited in McIntosh 1972: 97-8).

9 See my Deleuze and
the Unconscious (Continuum, 2007) for more on Deleuze's
interest in occultism/esoterica. Chapter 4 contains further
discussion of Malfatti, and chapter 6 looks at Deleuze's use of
occult approaches to the unconscious.

10 Brown's ideas were
also taken up in France by F. J-V. Broussais, first in his 1822
Traité de physiologie appliquée
Ã la pathologie [Treatise on Physiology
applied to Pathology], and then in his De l'irritation et
de la folie [On Irritation and Insanity], published in 1828.
Comte claimed that Broussais' work contained the first formulation
of the idea that 'the phenomena of disease coincided essentially
with those of health from which they differed only in terms of
intensity' (cited in Canguilhem 1943: 49). Canguilhem shows that
what Comte called 'Broussais's principle' in fact derives from the
ideas of Brown (ibid, 56-61). French caricature of the early 1830s,
incidentally, is full of satires and caricatures about the failure
of Broussais' system to combat cholera.

11 The story of opium is
a kind of historical tragedy. By the end of the nineteenth century,
with the increasing industrialisation and 'governmentalisation' of
medicine (and as a result of conflicts of interest between the
state, physicians, pharmacists and apothecaries) opium had become
subject to increasingly strict legal controls. Following the
earlier spread of morphinism, the decisive moment in its recent
history came with the synthesis of diacetylmorphine in 1874, which
was first marketed in 1898 in Germany under the brand name 'Heroin'
(derived from 'heroisch', heroic). Heroin entered the
nervous system more quickly, creating sensations of intense
pleasure, but the physical withdrawal symptoms were so marked that
the drug was unusable without the high risk of addiction. The story
of the rise of virulently hedonic drugs like heroin and cocaine in
the early twentieth century is also the story of the loss of
another age, in which drug experimentation was an integral aspect
of the Romantic tendency in medicine and science. An account of the
importance of drugs to Romantic thinkers in Germany has yet to be
written, although it is generally known that opium was important to
Schelling and Novalis. On the latter, see Neubauer 1971, and also
Boon's overview in his informative book on drug use by writers,
The Road to Excess (Boon 2002: 28-31). Alethea Hayter's
classic Opium and the Romantic Imagination discusses
Coleridge's and De Quincey's involvement with drugs in detail.

12 Thomas Beddoes
recalls that 'before he began his lecture, he would take forty or
fifty drops of laudanum in a glass of whisky; repeating the dose
four or five times during the lecture. Between the effects of these
stimulants and voluntary exertion, he soon waxed warm, and by
degrees his imagination was exalted into phrenzy' (cited in
Lawrence 1988: 5).

13 'My plan is developed
this far. I have decided to go for the summer to Bamberg.
Röschlaub insists that I study there
privatissima, and, as you can imagine, this is just what I
want' (Werke 7: 187). Adalbert Marcus wrote to Schelling
that 'Bamberg was one of the first places where the public
hospitals employed the Brown system. Now Bamberg will have the
praise of applying in medical treatment that which your philosophy
of nature is developing'. For these citations, see O'Meara 1982:
32-35.

14 'It is just by this
process of excitability that the product is elevated, becoming a
product of a potency higher than the merely chemical. Therefore, in
the following, we will make use of his [Brown's] concept, as long
as we are able to lead this concept back to natural causes'
(ibid).

15 Opium is placed in a
polarity with ipecacuanha (a dried root used as a purgative and
emetic).

16 Octave Aubry's novel
The King of Rome includes an episode featuring the
relationship of Malfatti with the brother and sister of Napoleon
Bonaparte, King Louis Bonaparte of Italy and Elisa Bacciochi. Aubry
describes how colleagues viewed Malfatti as 'much less a scientist
than a man of the world. His lively chatter and the pleasant taste
of his medicines had endeared him to everybody' (Aubry 1932:
190).

17 Mesmer put his
patients in a 'baquet', a tub filled with 'magnetised' water.

18 There even existed a
curious tribe of intentional arsenic eaters who inhabited the
mountain regions of Styria, Salzburg and the Tyrol in Austria (von
Bibra 1855: 214). They used it to help their breathing at those
altitudes, and it also had other functions in these societies, both
as an aphrodisiac, and as a weight-gaining drug which also induced
an attractive rosy glow in the cheeks. Bibra reports that workers
in arsenic mines have healthy and florid looks once they have
endured the first period in the mines (216).

19 Baader's diagnosis of
the faults of Schelling and Hegel is worth noting: 'We see the
error of both Schelling and Hegel as they treat the relationship of
nature to spirit. For Schelling spirit is never free of nature or
emancipated from nature. (He thinks that freedom would mean being
without a nature or being incorporeal). While, on the other hand,
Hegel pictures a natureless spirit that is only a ghost moving over
fallen nature' (Baader, Werke 15: 593; cited in O'Meara
1982: 135). Baader holds on to an idea of pure, spiritual freedom,
whereas Schelling insists that freedom never entirely escapes its
roots in irrational will. For Baader, this means that Schelling is
ultimately not a Christian.

20Malfatti does not use
the word 'Tantrism' (from Tantra, a Sanskrit word meaning, among
other things, 'web' 'weave', 'warp', 'unfolding' and 'expansion'),
but his hypersexual reading of Indian mysticism, and his emphasis
on occult anatomy, suggests that it is what he had in mind. There
are two forms of Tantrism, Hindu and Buddhist. Tantrism became a
widely spread cult in India during the eighth to eleventh centuries
CE, from which most of the Tantric texts (Tantras) date. The
tantrikas believed that the Tantras were a 'fifth Veda',
superseding the others. But there is still disagreement as to what
extent the magical writings in the ancient Atharva-Veda
and the hymns to Kali in the Rig-Veda contain the basic
tenets expounded in the Tantric writings and culture that emerged
in medieval India. Only a portion of Tantric writings explicitly
deal with sexuality; the rest is concerned with magic, ritual,
astrology, the construction of mandalas and the preparation of
ingredients for rituals.

21 Following Heidegger,
it is now often assumed that the German Romantic mind was oriented
squarely towards the Greek world as the primordial source of
thought and life. But it is truer to say that it was the ancient
Orient which was held to be the cradle of the idealism which was
then in the ascendant in Germany. According to Ernst Benz, Schlegel
was convinced that the discovery of Vedic literature would be as
important for contemporary German philosophy as the rediscovery of
the ancients in the Renaissance (Benz 1968: 17). Mysticism was
considered to be a primordial revelation, and Indian mysticism in
particular was seen by Schlegel as bearing 'everywhere traces of
divine truth' (cited in Benz, ibid).

22 Nevertheless, Max
Müller, who translated some of the Upanishads for
Schelling, recalled that 'like Schophenhauer, [Schelling]
considered the Upanishads as the original wisdom of the Indians and
of mankind' (cited in Glasenapp 1960: 29). See also A. Leslie
Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German
Romanticism (1964), and Jean W. Sedlar, India in the Mind
of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer and their Times (1982).
None of these studies refer to Malfatti, reinforcing his
obscurity.

23 Creuzer had schooled
himself in Schelling's work (Williamson 2004: 121-6), and Schelling
himself was in turn to rely heavily on Creuzer's four-volume tome
in his later philosophy of mythology.

24 > 'When dealing
with almost all major myths . . . we must, so to speak, first
orient ourselves to the Orient' (cited in Williamson 2004:
129).

25 See the
methodological papers in Antoine Faivre & Wouter J. Hannegraaf,
Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion
(1998).

26 For a partial
analysis of some aspects of 'Mathesis, Science and Philosophy', see
Deleuze and the Unconscious, pp. 124-137.

27 Why use this rather
obnoxious term 'occultism', rather than 'esotericism', which
Deleuze himself uses in Difference and Repetition and
Logic of Sense, and which is still used today by one of
the main traditions of the scholarly study of hermetic philosophy?
Antoine Faivre argues for the unity of the notion of 'esotericism'
by claiming that there are 'six constitutive elements. Four of
these are intrinsic to 'esotericism': the doctrine of universal
correspondences, living nature, imagination/meditation, and
transmutation. The other two are extrinsic (i.e. they may be absent
in certain cases): concordance of traditions, and transmission of
knowledge' (Faivre 1998: 2). Faivre is saying that the emphasis on
tradition and initiation should not been taken as
essential to esotericism. So why, even in spite of Deleuze's use of
the term 'esoteric', do I still want to suggest that the term
'occultism' better describes what is at stake for Deleuze? First,
because the primary emphasis in 'occultism' of what is hidden from
conventional perception or understanding can be contrasted to an
'esotericism' which still implies an 'inner sanctum' that is
revealed through a traditional, established process of initiation.
Second, in his 1974 Freud Memorial Lecture, 'The Occult and the
Modern World', Mircea Eliade makes an interesting distinction
between 'occultism' and 'esotericism' which has some relevance to
Deleuze's approach. Basing his discussion on the role played by
occultism in nineteenth-century literary France, Eliade argues for
a bifurcation between a conservative 'esotericism' which insulates
itself from any contact with wider society, and an
anti-establishment 'occultism' dedicated to the transformation of
society through the production of works of art with symbolic power,
and through the design and enactment of revolutionary political
strategies. 'Quite another orientation [from conservative
esotericism] is evident among those French authors of the second
part of the nineteenth century who became attracted to occult
ideas, mythologies, and practices made popular by
Ã‰liphas Lévi, Papus and Stanislas de
Guaita. From Baudelaire to Verlaine, Lautreamont to Rimbaud, to our
own contemporaries, André Breton and his disciples,
all these artists utilised the occult as a powerful weapon in their
rebellion against the bourgeois establishment and its ideology.
They reject the official contemporary religion, ethics, social
mores, and aesthetics. Some of them are not only anticlerical, like
most of the French intelligentsia, but anti-Christian' (Eliade
1974: 52). There is something about the gaudy, concertedly
syncretic approach of occultism which makes it more suited to an
emancipatory Deleuzian perspective than the closed Masonic world of
'esotericism'.

28 'Pharmacology in the
most general sense promises to be so extremely important for
practical and theoretical research on schizophrenia. The study of
the metabolism of schizophrenics opens up a vast field of research
in which molecular biology has a crucial role to play. A chemistry
at once intensive and experiential seems able to go beyond the
traditional organic/psychic duality at least in two directions: 1)
the experimental schizoid states induced through mescaline,
bulbocapnine, LSD, etc; 2) the therapeutic initiative to calm the
anxiety of schizophrenics, while dismantling their catatonic shell
in order to jump-start the schizophrenic machines and get them
running again (the use of 'major tranquilizers' or even LSD)'
(Deleuze 1975: 22). At the experimental level, psychoactive
substances can be used to induce schizoid states, says Deleuze. The
idea that hallucinogens can be psychotomimetics was advocated most
influentially in the 1950s, but proponents of this view (such as
Gordon Claridge) are still to be found today. Deleuze elaborates
that 'schizophrenic delirium can be grasped only at the level of
this 'I feel' which every moment records the intensive relation'
(ibid) between stasis and excitation. At the practical level,
Deleuze says, drugs such as LSD can help restore vitality and
movement to schizophrenics who have plunged into a catatonic
stasis. If Deleuze's ideas in this area are to be taken as more
than mere sketches of positions, then it should be asked how
essential these ideas are to his own general theory of
schizophrenia, and his philosophy in general. They may be
aberrations or they may be intrinsic; or again, they may be merely
confused. The means for pursuing and resolving such questions,
however, barely exist at present.

29 In the second part of
his Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among
the Greeks, Erwin Rohde contended that Dionysiac intoxication
is evidenced in its pure form in the practices of the Thracian and
Scythian tribes which bordered Ancient Greece. Referring to
Herodotus's famous account of the funerary hemp rituals of the
Scythians (Histories IV: 73), Rohde stresses that
'intoxication [Rausch] is generally regarded by savage
tribes as a religiously inspired condition' (Rohde 1894: 273).
Proceeding to compare the use of hemp in the vapour-huts of the
Scythians, Thracians with the practices of the North-American
Indians, Rohde suggests that the effects of this particular perfume
are consistent with descriptions of 'the real bakchoi at
the nightly festival of Dionysus' (Rohde 1894: 274). Rohde, of
course, was a close friend of Nietzsche during the 1870s, publicly
defending the latter's ideas about Dionysus in Birth of
Tragedy. However, Rohde does not refer to Nietzsche by name in
Psyche. Deleuze and Guattari also of course discuss the
ways of the Scythians at length in A Thousand Plateaus,
but Deleuze never actually makes the move of identifying
Nietzsche's Dionysiacs, or his primal overmen, as Scythians or
Thracians. Some might argue that such empirical correlates are
beside the point for Deleuze and Guattari, who are not historians
but philosophers. The problem is how to determine the function of
Deleuze and Guattari's historical examples. Paul Patton's recent
article 'Mobile Concepts, Metaphor and the Problem of
Referentiality in Deleuze and Guattari' discusses developments in
Deleuze scholarship which encounter and attempt to treat this
problem (Patton 2006).

30 In The Visionary
D.H. Lawrence, Robert Montgomery states that 'if one were
forced to described the thought of the later Lawrence in one word,
that word would have to be 'theosophical'. During the period from
Women in Love to his death, the important new influences
on him were theosophical, and his most important writings were
based on ideas drawn from theosophical sources' (Montgomery 1994:
168).

31 For instance, the
'seven breaths' and 'five winds' of John of Patmos are related to
the seven tattvas and the five pranas. In
Tantrism, 'kundalini' denotes vital energy, symbolised as a
Serpent, coiled around the spine. While this energy initially
appears to be sexual, it is able to move up three pathways
(nÃ¢dis, which Pryse translates as 'pipes' or
'tubes') in the body, changing in nature as it develops. On the one
hand, the sushumna is the pipe leading from the spinal
cord up to the cranium, while Ã®dÃ¢
and pingala, correspond to the left and right vertical
pathways of the sympathetic nervous system (Pryse 1910: 19). The
gnostic yogi tries to awaken each of the seven chakras or
'nerve centres', which are arranged in ascending order up the
spine. The central path of 'serpent power', the sushumna,
can only be activated through the creation of polarities between
Ã®dÃ¢ and pingala, which
are symbolised as moon and sun. Pryse is happy to call the
chakras 'nerve centres' or 'ganglia', and even suggests
that readers of his work should have a detailed knowledge of
'psycho-physiology' (6, 15).

32 'The esotericist',
according to Pryse, 'refusing to be confined within the narrow
limits of the senses and the mental faculties, and recognizing that
the gnostic powers of the soul are hopelessly hampered and obscured
by its imperfect instrument, the physical body, devotes himself to
what may be termed intensive self-evolution, the conquest and
utilization of all the forces and faculties which lie latent in
that fontal essence within himself' (Pryse 1910: 8).

Bibliography

Original dates of publication (in the primary language) are
given in the first set of brackets, dates of translations at the
end of the reference.

Lawrence, Chris (1988) 'Cullen, Brown, and the Poverty of
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Lawrence, D.H. (1923) Fantasia of the Unconscious
(London: Secker).

-- (1932) Apocalypse (London:
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Lesky, Erna (1976) The Vienna Medical School of the
19th Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
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Reggio, David (2003) 'Jean Malfatti de Montereggio: A Brief
Introduction', in Working Papers on Cultural History and
Contemporary Thought, paper 1 (November 2003), available at
A draft translation of Deleuze's Malfatti piece is attached to
this piece.

Williamson, George S. (2004) The Longing for Myth in
Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to
Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago).

Yates, Frances (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago).

---(1966) The Art of Memory (London: Routledge).

Zeltner, Hermann (1954) Schelling (Stuttgart:
Frommanns).

Christian Kerslake is a Research Fellow at the Centre
for Modern European Philosophy at London. His research focuses on
post-Kantian German philosophy and twentieth-century French
philosophy (particularly Bergson and Deleuze). He is the author of
Deleuze and the Unconscious (Continuum 2007).